Kurt Andersen and Anne Kreamer, as the Lunts of the lit set. (Photo courtesy of Mark Iantosca, courtesy of The New Inquiry)

The main lounge of the Jane Hotel was probably the brightest most people had ever seen it on Sunday afternoon, as literati packed the room for a marathon reading of Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, a scrappy postmodern novel that details those dubious adventures —Greta Garbo, in a tank, visits him at one point—and lifts around a quarter of its pages from other sources like Friedrich Engels and Washington Irving. Around 63 readers, identified by number in a program and on a giant screen to the right of the room, read portions of the text over a five-hour period, with memorable turns in the role of Mao from Kurt Andersen and a puppet.

The event was organized by The New Inquiry, New Directions, Bomb magazine and ForYourArt, though Google picked up the check. The reading had no doubt received a boost from a Thursday Styles piece on the New Inquiry’s mid-20s contributors, which called them the new “literary cubs”—“Some of the ‘cubs’ are reading!” a man with glasses around his neck whispered to a friend.

Standing before the fireplace, under the ruined disco ball and reflected by something like 20 mirrors—have you ever noticed how many mirrors there are in that place?—Mr. Tuten thanked everyone for coming and spoke of his youth in the Bronx (“I always think of that poem by Ogden Nash: ‘The Bronx / No thonx’”). He praised the young people who came to him with the idea for the reading after performing several of their own smaller-scale readings.

“They were getting together, probably getting blind drunk and flirting, but they were having fun and doing it!” he said. (Actually, The Times, describing a scene at one such reading, was pretty unambiguous on this: “Despite the fact that everyone was young and attractive, no one seemed to flirt or network.”)

“Every couple of years The Times writes those pieces,” said Lynne Tillman (number 39), in the VIP area upstairs, waving her hand. “More important than that is that there are people continuing to be involved in literature and writing—whether they’re literary cubs or small little tigers or frogs, I don’t really care!”

There was Laurie Anderson, reading like she’d written her assigned section. There was Lydia Davis, reading like she was afraid of hers. Wallace Shawn grinned like crazy on deck as he watched Deborah Eisenberg’s performance. (The journalist James Traub caught up with the two of them on the stairs outside to tell them they were the best. “Oh, I’m sure you tell that to all the number 11s and 12s,” Mr. Shawn demurred.)

In the audience, there was a girl with a floppy-eared hat, a pea coat, a skirt so short The Transom couldn’t see it, Frye motorcycle boots and a Brooklyn Industries tote bag. I might change your life, her look seemed to say, but I might also break all your Talking Heads LPs in a fight.

“I think there were some reactions to the piece that interpreted The New York Times’s interpretation of us as our interpretation of ourselves,” said the 26-year-old New Inquiry co-founder Rachel Rosenfelt, pushing the smoke of a bummed cigarette out of her mouth, outside. She works as a public speaking agent to pay the bills and declined to point to any particular negative feedback she’d received, though she emphatically stated she was not talking about Gawker, even though it did call her group “annoying” and “pretentious,” en route to mocking the Styles section generally.

“That was, like, the best response we got, in a way!” she said. “I loved it. I remember, it was like, ‘Gawker, wow!’ I was so star-struck. I really love Gawker! And we couldn’t believe we were on Gawker! We were amazed! I felt 100 percent great about everything.”

The puppet Mao, about two feet tall and operated by a man in a shabby suit, had wandered through the lounge greeting admirers as other readers read and made a bully pulpit of a couch by the fire, denouncing prostitution and praising monogamy.

Rah-rah monogamy! Mr. Andersen and his wife, Anne Kreamer, served as the grand finale, numero 63—an Oscar Wilde-quoting Mao many years after the Long March, and an interviewer. Mr. Andersen was stirring, earning snaps and guffaws from the audience (“What do you think about birth control?”/“Shut! Up!”). To what did Mr. Andersen credit his ability to channel Mao?  “Oh,” he said casually afterward, “being an arrogant killer of millions.”

In the lobby of the hotel, Walter Mosely (number 4) said he wasn’t surprised that the young ones had latched onto the book. In the years since it was published, fiction had become only more conservative in a way that made Mr. Tuten “not unlike Melville or Gogol—you can look at him today and say, ‘Hey, this stuff is amazing!’”

By the way, what was he doing when he was 25?

“Nothing,” Mr. Mosley said. “I was wasting time, getting high, getting laid, that’s what I was doing.” 

Greenman, spelling champion.

The contestants represented New York’s spelling elite. Many of them had whole careers’ worth of spelling behind them, elevated reputations and steady salaries underpinned by the public’s faith in their agility with words.

Now, sitting in two rows before an audience on the third floor of the Standard Hotel, wearing comically large name tags and sparkly bumblebee antennae that bobbled gently as they fidgeted, they awaited the bloodletting. While this particular group might be upstaged by the children on ESPN every year, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Annual Spelling Bee fundraiser is nevertheless a very serious affair.

Ira Silverberg, the dapper silver-tongued literary agent from Sterling Lord Literistic, was the evening’s host. The judge was Jesse Sheidlower, a man whose pinstriped suit, severely trimmed hair and rimless glasses might have passed as a dictionary-editor Halloween costume, if he were not already editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Warming up the crowd, which had just come from a silent auction, Mr. Silverberg asked his co-host what new words would be coming out in the next edition.

“I’m not on the new words team,” said Mr. Sheidlower, flustered.

“Just give us something from the street.”

“Well, the Concise Oxford Dictionary did add ‘sexting,’” he said, then blushed.

The first contestant at the microphone was Jonathan Burnham, the British-born publisher of HarperCollins described by Mr. Silverberg as “a talented pianist, owner of two dogs and a fantastic speller.” Mr. Burnham fulfilled expectations with a flawless execution of the word “reliquary.”

Nancy Franklin, the recently departed television critic of The New Yorker, came next.

“So,” said Mr. Silverberg. “Did you quit your job?”

“I did!” said Ms. Franklin. “I’m leaving my job to not write. I’ve worked for The New Yorker for 33 years.”

“So you started at age 12?” said the charming host.

Her word: “Genealogical.”

“Oh Jesus,” she said, but then rattled it off without error.

The first elimination, however, was not long in coming.

“James Frey!” crooned Mr. Silverberg. “You publishing provocateur! You don’t even write the books, you get kids to write them at the YMCA.” Mr. Frey’s word was “commissariat.”

“It’s going to be a first round exit this year,” he said, sighing. He was right.

The novelist Julia Glass spelled “commissariat” correctly, then Ben Greenman, an editor at The New Yorker, powered through “nacreous” (“made of or resembling mother-of-pearl”). The novelist Bernice McFadden succumbed to “strychnine,” then Francine Prose, David Rakoff and Elissa Schappell all fell afoul of “antecedence,” which most spelled as some variation of “antecedents.” Only Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand finally chose the correct homonym.

“Oh, Simon Winchester,” said Mr. Silverberg to the next contestant, the British author of Krakatoa. “Fancy-schmancy! You’ve always had this posh thing. I like that.” Mr. Winchester poshly spelled “asseverate.”

Thereafter, the casualties came quickly. Meg Wolitzer, author of The Uncoupling, went out on “uncrystallized;” Ms. Simonson fell to “aardwolf;” and Mr. Winchester to “virgule.” Ms. Glass spelled “chary” as “charry.” Both Patricia Marx and Bob Morris misspelled “opprobrium” (although Mr. Morris earned Mr. Silverberg’s opprobrium when he hinted that the host, also Mr. Morris’s husband, would soon be leaving his job at Sterling Lord to a destination as yet unknown). O books editor Sara Nelson succumbed to “wantonness.” Lynne Tillman proved ignorant of “ignoramus.” Finally only Ms. Franklin, Ms. Burnham, and Mr. Greenman remained. The death knell was “pyrosis” or heartburn, which both Mr. Burnham and Ms. Franklin spelled with two “r”s. Mr. Greenman asked for language of origin: Latin. Victory!

Wearing a paper crown decorated with pipecleaners and shaped like a large golden bee and clutching his new copy of the OED, Mr. Greenman looked underwhelmed by his win. “I won before, in 2009,” he said.

Earlier in the evening he had been handing out a small flier for the Occupy Alphabet movement, which read “Why do the top six letters in our alphabet use more than 50 percent of the available space in all spelling? It hardly seems fair.”

Asked if he was a whiz speller as a child, Mr. Greenman said he preferred math. As for his strategy of always asking for the language of origin (including on the word “kibbutznik,” which drew a laugh), Mr. Greenman said, “I just like stalling.”

The next morning, however, Mr. Greenman sent us an e-mail. “I dreamed about spelling, sort of,” he wrote. “I was in some kind of banquet hall and I needed to use the restroom and the doors had M and W on them and the letters were kind of important, there, in the dream. Normally you just find the right one and push on through but I think I had the alphabet on my mind.”

Posterity, though, may yet believe in Ms. Tillman. The author of five novels and a number of story collections, she is a writer-in-residence at the University of Albany and has since 2002 been the fiction editor of Fence, a position previously held by Ben Marcus and Jonathan Lethem. Next month, her work will be brought back into print by Red Lemonade, the new publishing imprint of Richard Nash, the founder of Soft Skull who published Ms. Tillman's last novel, American Genius: A Comedy. She is prolific and consistent if not as widely read as she should be. Her writing follows troubled men and women, overcome by an everyday assault of ephemera, whether external, as in the sleepless New York City night that is the premise of her novel No Lease on Life, or personal, like the narrator's fascination with her own skin in American Genius. Her stories contain less of a plot than a scattered mind jumping from one association to the next. Her new story collection, Someday This Will Be Funny (Red Lemonade, 160 pages, $14.95), shows she is constantly challenging herself and her readers.

"Relative to certain writers," Ms. Tillman, 66, told The Observer last week, "ones who call themselves language poets, there's nothing experimental about my work." She wore all black and kept her sunglasses on indoors, her small figure at ease beneath a head of disorderly black hair. "Because I'm working with narrative. And compared with more mainstream writers, I am experimental. I am doing something that's odd. But I don't write toward any of that. I just tell the story. I think pretty much everything's a story."

By the time Ms. Tillman was 8 years old, she knew she wanted to be a writer. As a child growing up in the New York suburbs, she raided her older sisters' bookshelves, tackling Mailer, Bellow, Robert Creeley and Gertrude Stein before she was old enough to drive. She attended Hunter College to study American history and literature (she's never taken a writing class), then left the country for six years, living in Europe like many of her literary idols. 

She returned to the city in the late '70s, believing she "could do everything." She became close with artists like Kiki Smith, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Craig Owens, the late editor of Art in America. Her new friends were asking her to write essays about art and image for catalogs and journals, which she resisted at first. She was a fiction writer. As a kind of retort, she created the character Madame Realism--a staunch feminist with a voice as judgmental as the narrator of Middlemarch and as direct as the Associated Press--and started to write about art. She finds a way to talk about her subject without really talking about it.

"Who could understand men," she writes in the first Madame Realism story, from 1984, which is about surrealism and includes a painting by Kiki Smith of sperm swimming in a circle, "or more, what they really wanted. Dali's conception of sexual freedom, for instance, written in 1930. A man presenting his penis 'erect, complete, and magnificent plunged a girl into a tremendous and delicious confusion, but without the slightest protest ... It is,' he writes, 'one of the purest and most disinterested acts a man is capable of performing in our age of corruption and moral degradation.' Madame Realism was not interested in display."

Madame Realism has appeared again and again over the years without ever revealing herself. She is not a character but rather omniscience personified, telling us what to think without ever giving anything away, a metaphor for Ms. Tillman's style itself: "Out of nothing comes language and out of language comes nothing and everything," she writes at the end of Someday This Will Be Funny, which continues in this vein of indeterminacy.

"I don't want this backstory business," Ms. Tillman said. The word "backstory" might as well have been "incest" coming from her mouth. "I just think that's horrible. I mean, backstory? What are you talking about? So often in writing classes you hear students say to one another, 'But I'd really like to know more about that character.' And I have to restrain myself. That's not the story. You don't get to know everything about the character. You get to know what's necessary."

Ms. Tillman makes nothing explicit. For that, she is paradoxically readable--we want to unpack the mystery because we know it will remain sealed--but has also been pigeonholed as "experimental"--"Can I shake that off?" Ms. Tillman asks--and kept effectively outside of the mainstream. She has worked with major publishers before--smaller imprints like Poseidon that are now long gone--but for the most part she has remained in the shadows of what is popular or conventional since her first novel, 1987's Haunted Houses, a book that follows the coming of age (or failure to) of three women in New York, their stories threatening to intersect but never colliding. 

"So-called mid-list writers like Lynne are certainly a category that is facing significant challenges right now," her publisher Mr. Nash said. "They're simply not making enough money for corporate publishers to want to publish them. While debut writers have a lot working against them, they are a blank slate. So they can be used for a publisher's projection. The reality is, most writers--especially women writers--are expected to write relationship-based stuff. Lynne discloses how the world is often weirder than our accounts of it give it credit for."

"She's not experimental in the off-putting sense of the word," said Lydia Davis, who Ms. Tillman has published in Fence and who taught alongside her at Bard in the '90s. "The writing is very open and human. The stories do not allow the reader's own mind to escape completely into the events of a character. They return to the reader's mind, to the way you live, the way you make decisions."

The confidence Ms. Tillman places in her readers--that they will accept not knowing--is what she expects from any story, not just the writers she publishes in Fence or the students in her writing workshops, but from herself as well.

"I want to see that there is really a mind working," Ms. Tillman said. "Not simply someone thinking about the arc of the story."

Sitting across from The Observer at the table, looking out the restaurant's window, Ms. Tillman's eyes widened suddenly. She stood up fast.

"Excuse me," she said and rushed outside.

The Observer saw her run up to a tall bald man in a pinstriped suit and a brown leather jacket. She embraced him hard on the sidewalk. It was the Irish author Colm Tóibín. The two walked back together and Mr. Tóibín stepped up to the window. The Observer pressed his hand against the glass in greeting. Mr. Tóibín raised his right arm and-instead of the expected wave--did the sign of the cross over The Observer's hand. The two entered and Mr. Tóibín slumped into a chair.

"Why is everyone so difficult except me? Why are people so hard? Hi."

"Hi," Ms. Tillman said. "We met in 1990 on tour together. His first novel."

"Thirty-five years ago," Mr. Tóibín said in his Irish brogue.

"It's not 35. I mean, I'm not a mathematician but that's ridiculous."

"I know. I just threw it in there to make sure you were listening." He groaned and rubbed his hands on his head. "How do you get out of things?" He glanced at the table.

"What's this?"

"It's my new book."

In an instant his face lit up, all the self-pity evaporating from his countenance. "Oh, darling!" he exclaimed
as he whipped on a pair of red glasses and started to scan the contents. "Well, I'm glad Madame Realism finally found a conscience," he said, referring to the story "Madame Realism's Conscience." He raised his eyebrows at Ms. Tillman. "She didn't before?"

"No, she didn't," she said with a sly look. "It's never too late, I suppose."

mmiller@observer.com